A Brazilian Oresteia: Geraldo Ferraz's Doramundo
2004; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-7599
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Culture, and Criticism
ResumoGERALDO Ferraz's Doramundo (1956) is a blend of modernist narrative, detective fiction and social criticism. (1) The novel addresses the clash of individual desire with the requirements of collective order, highlighting the irrepressibility of the former and the failure of authoritarian solutions to provide the latter. Doramundo is set during the 1950's in the fictional Brazilian railroad company town of Cordilheira. The burg, dominated by a single employer, is an artificial settlement created to provide an on-site labor for railway station transporting raw materials between Brazil's coastal cities and the country's rapidly developing interior (Lindstrom 56). The essential problem of the community is an excess supply of single men and a corresponding scarcity of unmarried women. The bachelors have affairs with married and the cuckolded husbands, obeying the dictates of the code of machismo, murder the men who have besmirched their names. (2) This practice becomes generalized to the point that the town's social interaction is almost exclusively a cycle of serial adultery and murder. This underlying dramatic tension of Ferraz's novel parallels Aeschylus's theatrical trilogy The Oresteia where a pattern of transgression and revenge takes on a life of its own as the community descends into anarchy (Lattimore 14). (3) The Oresteia deals with the formation of the basic social contract between the individual and the collective. In return for full membership in society the individual is willing to forego extra-legal revenge and submit all cases of familial or personal honor to an impersonal system of justice (Goldhill 32). The Oresteia, through the character Clytemnestra, also represents a protest against the double standard that surrounds honor and vengeance in the world (Goldhill 41). In a society that does not even recognize as being worthy of citizenship Clytemnestra, wife of King Agamemnon, temporarily achieves a reversal of gender roles. She dares to avenge herself for Agamemnon's sacrifice of her daughter Ifigenia, as well as the king's adulterous affair with the Trojan princess, Cassandra. While her husband Agamemnon is away at war Clytemnestra takes a lover, Aegisthus. In addition to her open cuckoldry of her husband, Clytemnestra--using Aegisthus as an instrument or revenge--convinces the latter to murder her husband, thereby making herself the undisputed head of the house of Atreus. Agamemnon's and Clytemnestra's son, Orestes, avenging his father's killing, then murders Clytemnestra. The Furies, outraged by the crime of matricide, proceed to pursue Orestes with the intent of eliminating him. The Oresteia's cycle of reprisals for wrongs done by men to and vice-versa is a clear expression of the Greek tendency towards polarization where the only alternative to rule by men is the rule by women (Goldhill 40). A similar polarization is present throughout Doramundo. The amorphous and transient community of Cordilheira is in the throes of a crisis of libido that has put all values into question. Like the transgressive liaison of Clytemnestra the rampant adultery in Cordilheira temporarily produces a fundamental change in the power relations between men and women. The town's wives, showered with gifts and attention, suddenly enjoy a sexual freedom normally reserved for men. Even in the face of the violent response of their spouses, these recognize their enhanced authority and prestige while openly taunting their husbands with their infidelities. This state of affairs represents a temporary cessation of the double standard of machismo and constitutes the overthrow of the patriarchal supremacy of the household by the wives through their sexual relationship with itinerant outsiders (the bachelors). Most importantly, Cordilheira's sexual revolution underscores the subversion of the prevailing social order implied in the practice of adultery. By undermining the traditional family unit adultery tends toward dissolution of the basic social entity and, with the potential break-up of the family, threatens to return some or all family members to a state of nomadism. …
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